In every century people have thought they understood the universe at last, and in every century they were proved to be wrong.
It follows that the one thing we can say about our modern "knowledge" is that it is wrong.

- Isaac Asimov

I don’t assume I know everything. Not even that I know enough.
And no more than you ;-)
I will share some experience and facts from real life that can help us understand IT and Cloud better.
Comments welcome.

June 14, 2016

Why don't you try Openstack (without getting your hands dirty)?

Openstack is mature (but complex).

Surveys and statistics show that Openstack is mature and provides a number of benefit to a broad spectrum of users, from small to large enterprises and service providers.

Almost every professional in the IT (including CIOs and CTOs) knows the advantage that Openstack would offer to his organization.

But many are also aware of the complexity of the technology, the need for new operational processes and skills to set up and operate Openstack.

A scalable and reliable production environment is different from a lab where you explore the capabilities of the new platform.

The journey to a mature adoption of Openstack is not easy and you need to invest time and money.

In addition, when you hire people (or train yours), there is a possibility that another company steals them with the offer of a better salary, given the scarcity on the market.

So, many IT organizations - excluding cloud service providers, because that’s exactly their business - started wondering if it’s worth spending time in running the infrastructure, rather than running their business applications.

If you are not a cloud provider, that makes money selling IaaS, why should you dedicate additional effort to installation, monitoring, troubleshooting and release upgrades to ensure reliability and performances to your applications (that’s the only asset you should care of, because your business relies on them)?

Focus on your real business.

Why don’t you delegate all the responsibility to a provider, signing a contract that puts the above tasks and SLA on them?

Doing so, you would be free to use Openstack, getting all the benefit that you expect from it, without the burden of the learning curve and the organization implied by the Openstack adoption.

You would focus onusing the infrastructure to develop and run your applications, no longer on running the infrastructure itself.

That is called a managed service.

You own the infrastructure and exploit the value of your Data Center assets (you don’t just drop them to escape to a public cloud).

An expert team (it’s just their business) installs Openstack in your DC and operates it everyday in a HA (high availability) configuration, granting 99.99% uptime.

They take care of all the version upgrades and the compatibility of all the new features released by the community by using a certified configuration.

The user interface (the Horizon console, the Openstack API and command line interface) is available to you so you can deploy virtual server instances, networks, storage at will. You get complete and granular reporting on the health of the system and its performances.

You are the owner, but you don't get your hands dirtywith the complex stuff :-)

You pay them for the service, they grant you the SLA.

Just taste if you like Openstack.

The approach described above can be a strategical decision, because you want to focus on your business applications.

But you could also use this trick to stand up a Openstack environment in very short time, test it (I mean if your organization adapts to it, if your applications run well, if the operational model - IaaS at home, on your infrastructure, no cloud provider lock in - is good for you, if your developers are more productive) for a while, e.g. 3 or 6 months, and finally decide if you want to adopt it.

At that time you can choose between continuing with the managed service or doing it yourself.

It is a zero risk trial of the technology and of the processes: if you don’t like, you haven’t wasted any time and effort to stand it up so you can happily retreat.

You simply do not renew the service contract and that’s all: you have made a real informed decisionabout the adoption of Openstack.

Cisco Metapod: Openstack as a managed service.

Cisco has a offer that allows you to do what I described above, that comes from the acquisition of a company whose business was exactly Openstack as a managed service, on your premises.

They had a Openstack distribution of their own, optimized and hardened to provide a smooth and effective service.

Now, thanks to a strong partnership with Red Hat, the team is using the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Openstack distribution (OSP8, based on Liberty).

The essential features of this service are:

- easy start: entry level contract for 90 days

- ready to go live in 2-3 weeks from the engagement

- HA included

- the infrastructure to run Openstack can either be yours or provided by Cisco

- both the Openstack API and the AWS API are exposed by the system

And the infrastructure to run it in production can be as simple as this:

The value you can get from it: a well defined SLA, installation included, maintenance and upgrade included, no cloud provider lock in.

I believe that Cisco Metapod is a very good option to start with Openstack.

You can put your foot in the water to test the temperature, then decide to take a bath if you like it.